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A lipid system ceramide-fatty acid as a sensing material to detect lipophylic aquatic pollutants

The outstanding importance of oceans and waters in general and the need to monitor, explore an exploit them increases the necessity for fast, mobile sensors that would provide reproducible and reliable results in-situ. Lipophylic aquatic pollutants show biomembrane activity, a characteristic used in developing electrochemical membrane biosensor on a lipid coated mercury electrode, proposed by Nelson et al. [1]. The basic principle is that biomembrane active compounds react with lipid monolayers, disrupting their organization in a selective manner which can be monitored using out-of-phase alternating current (ac) voltammetry and fast cyclic voltammetry (cv). Self-assembled monolayer of N-oleoyl-D-erythro-sphingosine (C18:1 ceramide) as a sensing material was preliminary tested. Ceramide appeared to have favourable electrochemical behaviour as a sensing layer. Mixed monolayers of ceramide with linoleic and stearic fatty acid in defined molar ratios were tested in order to improve sensitivity and specificity of the biosensor (Fig. 1). The work done on a hanging mercury drop electrode will be continued in a flow cell system using a chip based mercury microelectrode [2] which will afterwards be incorporated into a robust sensing device for in-situ measurements.

electrochemical biosensor; pollutants; lipid monolayer; ceramide

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